Lies and coverups

It's hard to keep some things secret, no matter how much you try. This just moved on the AP wire. It was taken from the Web site of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which posted a few paragraphs on its Web site shortly after 1 p.m. today.

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. (AP) — West Virginia University retroactively awarded Gov. Joe Manchin’s daughter a master’s degree she didn’t earn, and administrators erred in ordering the change, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported Tuesday.

It's not the crime, offense or bad thing. It's the coverup. We once had a prominent employee of this newspaper who was arrested for drunk and disorderly. That's a misdemeanor, and we normally don't publish misdemeanors, but this employee insisted that we publish his/her arrest so we did not have the appearance of covering something up to protect one of our own.

You don't have to air all your dirty laundry, but a lie is a lie. Assuming the report on Bresch is accurate, we could soon see "clarifications" of "misstatements" or "faulty recollections." Or the verb tense known as past exonerative: "Mistakes were made." Or the non-apology apology: "I regret if anyone was offended by my misstatement."

Before he went to sleep last night, my youngest son -- who just turned 8 1/2 -- told me the one thing about his friends that disappoints him most is how much they lie. He has a hard time understanding why his friends lie to him so much. I've tried to explain the reasons people lie, but it still hurts.

I, too, wonder what goes through someone's head when they lie about their qualifications for a job, especially when their lies can be exposed so easily.

But that's the world, I guess.

I don't know who lied in this Heathergate stuff. I do want it to come to light, no matter how much WVU tries to cover it up.